Think of the rebuilt Globe theatre in Southwark, on London's south bank, and you think of Shakespeare, of authentic re-creations of the drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. But it can also be a venue for new writing. Peter Oswald, a veteran of the National Theatre and the Almeida, is the first writer to pen new scripts for the theatre since (give or take a 17th-century scribe or two) the Bard himself.
To Oswald, 36, Shakespeare's Globe "is naturally a space for new work". Doubters are referred to his new play for the Globe, The Golden Ass. His second work for the theatre, The Golden Ass seeks boldly to prove that this outdoor, ornate "wooden O" can host plays that are less than 400 years old.
There are plenty who question whether the attempt should even be made. Shakespeare's Globe is not configured for kitchen-sink drama. With its stage thrust out into a roofless auditorium, where punters blithely chat and chomp crisps, and with two marble pillars smack in the middle of the playing area, it puts very physical obstacles in the way of dramatists who wish to transport their audience. "People are always surprised to see us doing new plays," says Tim Carroll, who directs The Golden Ass and was also responsible for this season's revelatory all-male Twelfth Night.
But there is nothing apologetic about The Golden Ass. When the Globe Theatre Company first met to discuss it in June, there was palpable excitement at the audacity of the undertaking. The play is adapted from Apuleius's second-century tale of a lusty young man transformed into an ass. It features the myth (central to Freudian psychology, and to students of the human soul) of Cupid and Psyche. CS Lewis called it a "strange compound of picaresque novel, horror comic, mystagogue's tract, pornography and stylistic experiment".
The idea of the production was first mooted three years ago when the Globe's artistic director, Mark Rylance, pitched it to Oswald. It is Rylance who is the presiding, unashamedly spiritual sensibility behind the production. "We must approach this with Cupid and Psyche by our sides," he told the company early in rehearsals, "and with pleasure." As authorities on the Globe space, he and Carroll have been intimately involved in the highly collaborative development of Oswald's play, which has continued throughout the rehearsal period.
Rylance is also starring as the play's braying, buck-toothed hero. He is one actor among 30 - the Globe's biggest ever cast. Between them, they play 200 characters across 75 scenes. It is a major gamble, says Carroll - there is no studio space at the Globe in which to minimise the risk of staging new work. "The plays here tend to be Twelfth Night or Hamlet, and to put yourself up for comparison with those is asking a lot." He has done it once before: he directed Oswald's Augustine's Oak, a historical epic about the Christian conversion of England, which opened to mixed reviews in 1999.
So what lessons did Augustine teach the Globe team about writing for this unique space? "Firstly," says Carroll, "that it's extremely exposing to have any theme that isn't germane, or any stretch of five minutes that doesn't move the play forward." The actors are nose-to-nose with their audience, so there is no room for undramatic writerly indulgence. But there is plenty of room, as Shakespeare knew and as Carroll points out, for "the direct audience address. You wouldn't write a play for the Globe without capitalising on the ability of the audience to influence events and contribute their active imaginations. Because the audience will leave if they're bored. I have seen, in productions here that haven't fired the imagination, people just walk out of the yard. They've only paid five quid and they've had to stand up, so they think, 'Nothing lost if I just go and have a pint.'"
Oswald notes that it is equally important to reflect the way that the crowd are actually organised. "There is very much a feeling in Elizabethan theatre," he says, "of high and low, visceral and cerebral. There's a democratic feeling down among the groundlings, whereas up in the galleries it's more refined. So the language must try to be very grounded at some moments and very elevated at others."
Another factor, says Carroll, is that "you get a lot of visitors here who aren't habituated to theatre, and that makes them very willing to try different things". Which is just as well, because there is no guff at the Globe about "the fourth wall". "You're never a fly on the wall here," says the director. "This place makes the whole artificiality of theatre feel appropriate, rather than, as it often is nowadays, a kind of embarrassment. Theatre today often seems to wish it could make everything more real. That's not Shakespeare's way at all. He says: the audience are here, in broad daylight; what's the point of pretending they're not?"
When The Golden Ass was first proposed, Oswald embraced the opportunity "to do something that is highly theatrical, but also intelligent". Carroll has heightened the play's theatricality by staging it in the style of vaudeville - "to harness the vulgar power of the piece". At rehearsal, the cast are eager to exaggerate the drama and the jokes. One negotiation between Rylance and Carroll ends when the latter cottons on that, "You're saying you want that gag set up even cheesier?" At this theatre, Carroll confesses, "you have to avoid actors who are good at playing seven different levels of subtext at once in a fascinating but introverted way".
For Carroll, then, there would be no point in writing a Royal Court-style play for the Globe. "There is an atmosphere to the place that demands panache and an epic, kaleidoscopic staging. Actors in modern dress would not look interesting on that stage, because you have to make bolder visual statements than that. You could do modern plays in this space, but I think people would ask: 'What is this doing here?'"
And yet Carroll admits to a desire to stage Pinter's The Caretaker at the Globe, albeit in Elizabethan dress. If it were up to Oswald, there would be no men in tights in SE1 whatsoever. "I was half-joking the other day," he says, "that there ought to be a 10-year moratorium on Shakespeare at the Globe; that the theatre should be thrown open to living playwrights, to see what they could make of the space."
Oswald recently tried to develop a play for the theatre about the Romanian dictator Ceausescu. By his own admission, he failed; nevertheless, he is "totally in favour" of contemporary subjects being dramatised here. "The whole place feels like a public forum for new ideas to be flung back and forth."
His proposal strikes at the heart of the Globe's as yet unresolved identity. Savvy theatregoers consider it one of the most dynamic performing spaces in Britain. Its staff feel part of a project characterised by, in Carroll's words, the "crazy, ambitious vision" of Rylance. But to the world at large and to some of theatre's old guard, it is still just a tourist attraction. "There are so many preconceptions of what people think the Globe is for," says Oswald. "There have even been complaints that we're doing a new play, from some of the friends of the theatre." He believes that "the tourist attraction element works against the theatre element. You could change that completely. But it won't happen."
New plays are certainly, as Carroll confirms, "a very central plank of Mark's vision for the place". And there is no doubt that The Golden Ass, which takes satiric aim at godlessness and narcissism, has for its creators as contemporary a clout as anything at the Royal Court. But the question remains open as to whether new plays - or even, one day, plays with contemporary settings - will be accepted, by audiences or critics, as integral to the Globe's activities.
"We can't win in one sense," says Carroll. "Some people will always criticise it for being a heritage theatre, and others - sometimes the same people - will say, "What are they doing staging new plays?"
· The Golden Ass previews from Saturday. Box office: 020-7401 9919
